The Art Of Keyword Research For PPC Campaigns

Knowing how to execute a successful PPC campaign can add a lot of value to your online business. It’s one of the more responsive online marketing forms because you are able to get results within 24 hours of execution, whereas with other marketing methods such as social media and search engine optimization it can take a lot longer. Furthermore, the way to increase your rate of success is to go after the right keywords (KWs). Going after the wrong ones can actually prolong the amount of time it takes for you to see a return. So if you are to get PPC right read on for some tips on how to conduct keyword research.

Think Like Your Potential Buyers

You must put yourself in the shoes of your potential buyers. This will allow you to come up with a list of KWs that you would use if you were looking for the products which you are selling. You need to approach this problem from all possible angles which means you need to cover all the different reasons why people would buy your products. For example, if you are selling a weight loss product then possible angles might be to lose weight for the summer beach season, or another one might be to impress a partner. The more angles of attack you consider the better your coverage of your chosen niche will be. You may even capture the demographics of your niche that your competitors are not even targeting. An expert from PPC Hero explains how different people can call the same products differently:

Not all of them will be thinking or calling your products the exact same things. For example if you sell GPS systems worldwide, you might be interested to know that in the UK we call them ‘Sat Navs’.

To get inside the heads of your potential buyers you could conduct surveys where you find out exactly what it is your users are after when looking for your products. This may uncover some KWs that the KW research tools might not have.

Don’t Ignore The Long Tail Keywords

Bidding on only the most popular keywords in your niche is not going to prove to be a successful strategy, and this is especially true if you are a new business that hasn’t got the funds to compete with the big boys in your niche.

On the other hand, if you concentrate on the long tail KWs then you do have a chance. These are basically KWs that are less frequently searched because they are very long; some might even be a whole sentence. The point here is to go after many keywords at once in order to make it count since most long tail phrases do not get many searches individually. A sound PPC campaign can include as many as over a thousand different long tail KWs. A writer for Word Stream suggests that a significant amount of searches are unique:

According to Udi Manber, Google’s VP of search, 20 to 25% of Google queries are totally unique. This means that roughly a quarter of what people are typing into Google has never been typed by anyone else on the planet, ever.

Biding On Keywords

Another good reason for selecting long tail KWs is because the prices that you have to pay per click will be considerably lower, and this in turn means you can get leads for a smaller investment. Most popular keywords in your niche will attract the players with the biggest budgets, and competing with them can become unprofitable very quickly. Before you get to a stage where you find a bunch of profitable keywords you will need to take some loses as Brian Basch from Webstarters.co.nz explains:

It does take time to find the correct mix for keywords and bids, as you test and try new things you will probably take some losses. Always remember that conversions are usually only 10% of your clicks and not every one of the clicks.

You may start off with as many as 2000 different keywords that you think can make you a profit, but as you begin to run a test campaign you see that only 50 of them are really providing a profit. This is normal and you shouldn’t feel that it means you are doing something wrong. As with any other part of running an online business testing is extremely important if you are to increase your profits.

Increase Your Arsenal

When conducting your KW research don’t limit yourself to any one KW tool because that limits your ability to come up with great KWs. Most people running an Adwords PPC campaign will only use the built in KW tool, but there are other ones such as Google Trends, Google Insights and the Google Contextual Tool. By combining all of these into one keyword research strategy your approach will be comprehensive enough to spot the profitable KW opportunities that are out there in your niche. A Search Engine Watch writer suggests the importance of KW research:

Keywords are the building blocks of nearly all search-based PPC campaigns. It’s one of the first tasks new PPC professionals learn – without good keyword research skills, one can’t build a good campaign.

However, be careful regarding how to analyze data you come across. You can’t take the data that is given to you at face value since it may not be 100% accurate. Some KW tools are only able to estimate as opposed to giving you accurate figures, even if it looks like you are given accurate figures. Think about it, billions of searches are carried out each day and processing all of that data accurately is a mammoth task no matter how big a company may be. What KW tools allow you to do well is to compare the relative number of searches. By comparing the keywords you will know which ones you should go after, and from there it is all about the testing that you are willing to commit to.